Sunday, May 14, 2006

Howard Duh-ean on Same-Sex Marriage

No matter how often one looks away, Howard Dean's wrong, wrongheaded and wrong-hearted statements about same-sex marriage and about evangelical Christians won't go away. This bozo, with the title of chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- of the United States, not some rural Maine county -- showed his flaming red nose and blubbering lips last week.

Interviewed on Rev. Pat Robertson's 700 Club, Dean spoke for the party in terms probably not one in 10,000 Democrats would. Not only did he orally instantly reverse the party's policy, placing it against same-sex marriage, he pandered to the Christian right, saying Democrats had much in common with them and needed to accommodate them more.

We need a new spokesmodel, one with a brain installed.

You can watch the whole bizzarre interview here. Perhaps even stranger, you can scour the national Dem site and find zip, zilch, nada, rien, nothing about it. Even if there were nothing about his going into detox, there should have been some clarification about how he could be so out there, addled and alone.

The interview site has pretty fair coverage of his inane comments. On the CBN listenership:

I'm not saying we're going to agree with everything, between the more conservative evangelicals and the Democrats, but there's a lot more common ground than most people realize, and we're willing to work with the evangelical community.

Oddly enough, though, it does not cover what the video shows, his totally wrong comments about SSM. Specifically, "The Democratic Party platform from 2004 says that marriage is between a man and a woman. That's what it says."

On Earth, in reality, in this century, as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force noted, "In fact, the DNC 2004 platform says, 'We support full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and seek equal responsibilities, benefits, and protections for these families. In our country, marriage has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there. We repudiate President Bush's divisive effort to politicize the Constitution by pursuing a Federal Marriage Amendment. Our goal is to bring Americans together, not drive them apart.'"

The Washington Post offered background and details here and here. Its coverage notes that this is not Dean's only blunders on gay issues. "Earlier this month, Dean fired the DNC's gay outreach adviser, Donald Hitchcock, less than a week after his domestic partner, Paul Yandura, had criticized Dean's efforts to protect gay rights. He was immediately replaced by another activist, but over the past year, other concerns have been raised about Dean's bridge-building to gays."

Following the 700 Club interview, Dean caught some hell. The Post quoted him as saying simply, "I misstated the Democratic Party's platform, which does not say marriage should be limited to a man and a woman." He affirmed equal protection for all Americans, for the moment at least.

The Task Force will return a $5,000 check from the DNC, at least until the party gets its stuff together on fundamental issues. According to the Post, their executive director, Matt Foreman, "said Dean should be persuading Democrats to fight against ballot initiatives seeking to ban gay marriage, but instead has misrepresented the party's 'important and affirming plank' several times. 'There has been a disturbing lack of clarity from Governor Dean about where we fit into the party and the country.'"